Danny Boyle's Opening Ceremony Inspired by “Frankenstein”

The "Slumdog Millionaire" director takes queues from British stage play of Mary Shelley's famous creation for the Olympic opener.

It may be a case of “Frankenstein” meets “Trainspotting” when the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games is revealed.

Filmmaker Danny Boyle revealed in the June issue of Vogue that he took some inspiration from “Frankenstein” while formulating plans for the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Games.

The British director has taken on the herculean task of orchestrating the $42 million spectacular that will raise the curtain on the global sporting event come July 27.

“It's a challenge, of course, because it can easily be just a cold spectacle — awe-inspiring but not necessarily of the heart — and we want the ceremony to have a visceral effect on the people, for it to be a collective experience,” he said in the interview. “Stirring emotion is hard in a stadium.”

According to Boyle, the ceremony will also include “quite a lot of ‘Frankenstein.’ I mean we don’t reanimate dead creatures, but we did use ‘Frankenstein’ as a dry run for a lot of ideas for this.” Like Shelley’s famous doctor, the Oscar-winning director of “Slumdog Millionaire” will inject life into what has remained dormant for the past four years.

Boyle directed a production of “Frankenstein” for the Royal National Theatre in 2011 in which Benedict Cumberbatch (of “Sherlock” fame) and Johnny Lee Miller (“Dark Shadows”) traded off playing the roles of the doctor and the monster. A filmed version of the stage play is scheduled to hit U.S. movie screens in June. The music for the stage version was written by English electronic band Underworld, who are also writing original music for the Opening Ceremony.

In terms of what audiences can expect visually, Boyle hopes that the venue will look “more like a cauldron, with all the people hovering around you.”

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